History of Cascadia
1780s-1825 The region that later became Cascadia was home to hundreds of Native American tribes. Smallpox and related illnesses began to spread into the area, killing thousands. Yureerachen was a powerful medicine man of the Spokane nation. Following the death of his son to the Contagion, he prayed to the Gods and received a powerful vision of a swiftly approaching appocalypse and a chipixia, a white-skinned man from the East who might be able to save the world. His arrival in the region would be marked by a powerful omen. Yureerechen ( I have deleted the ravings of the mad man who greatly altered history ) For a more truthfull account of Yureerachen ( ie. Circling Raven ) prophesy do a Google search on those names as well as Spokane Garry. Bendevi is a city in Greece. The rest of the stuff on this page is fiction. It would however make a nice episode of Stargate. 1825-1859 Benedict and his 23 year old daughter Helena arrived in Fort Astoria (Vancouver) in 1825. Stories about the Bendevi had spread throughout the region but this was their first visit to an established white settlement. Helena met a trapper-fur trader named Jubal Mayfair and remained in the area as his wife for ten years. She had three children with him: Alice, Joseph, and Jacob. When her father returned to Vancouver in 1835, she abandoned her husband and the children to travel with him throughout the Puget Sound area to all the white settlements. In 1852, Helena remained in Duwamps (Seattle) befriending David "Doc" Maynard and becoming part of the new settlement's leading citizens while her father returned to helping the native tribes. She was pregnant and the half-mad Catholic priest, Henry Kirk Abbott, dropped to his knees in front of her one day, babbling the Sangreal Doctrine and touching her stomach, declaring her baby to be the future "King of heaven on earth". Henry Kirk Abbott, financially supported by Helena, built the original Temple of the Sun in Spokane and founded the Aurelian Church. Helena gave birth to her son Lucas on December 21st, 1852 but died on December 24th. Her oldest daughter Alice moved from Vancouver, telling Abbort and others that she'd been visited by the archangel Uriel on the day of her little brother's birth and asked to become his legal and spiritual guardian. Alice demonstrated all the same miraculous powers that Helena and Elaine had and used them to both benefit the Aurelian Church and become independently wealthy. On the day of Helena's death, the Bendevi traveled up Mount Tahoma. He vanished for a year and then appeared in a flash of light to the high chief of the Spokane with seven strange companions he called the Haalayt. Benedict gathered the leaders of all the native tribes that revered him and told them that he had been in communication with the gods and with their aid, he was going to create a new nation of native and settlers alike after a great war. This new nation, Cascadia, would bring many changes to their traditional ways but that it was the only way to avert the End Times that Yureerachen had seen in his vision 71 years previously. The majority of tribal leaders pledged their support to the Bendevi. The Bendevi and his seven Halaayt traveled on magical "windhorses" that could outrun any living animal and even teleport from one location to another. Henry Kirk Abbott declared the Halaayt to be the avatars of seven archangels and incorporated their existence into the Sangreal Doctrine. Stories about the miracles that the Bendevi and Haalayt could preform trickled back east, including to political leaders in Washington DC but they were treated like they were treated as part of the "Gold-craze" and nothing more than folk stories like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill which were popular at the time. 1859-1873 Oregon entered the Union as the 33rd state on February 14, 1859 with George Abernathy and John McLoughlin serving as a political filter between The Bendevi and the other factions. On that same day, the Bendevi was in England and had a private audience with Queen Victoria- an event that only increased the claims made by the Aurelian Church and the believers of the Sangreal Doctrine. Civil war came in 1861 with the election of Abraham Lincoln to office. Seven Southern states declaring their secession. Hostilities began when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln responded by calling for a volunteer army from each state, leading to declarations of secession by four more Southern slave states. The Bendevi endorced the Aurelian Church and the Sangreal Doctrine as "higher but not absolute truths" and spoke of the equal validity of native spiritualism and insisted that Cascadia would be a "nation of equals, man and woman, native and settler, pagan and Christian." By May 1st, the followers of the Bendevi had successfully dismantled the Oregon government and created his own, controlled by himself and the Haalyt as well as favored human allies, both tribal and settlers. The Bendevi promised to give 160 acres of land or a bag of gold to anyone who raised up arms on his behalf as part of the New Dawn militia. He promised the homesteaders and natives who didn't want to stay in Cascadia that they were free to leave and would be escorted safely to the borders. Anyone who wished to remain and become a citizen of the new nation was obliged to take a vow of fidelity to him and the new monarchy. Some swore out of religious devotion, others for materialistic gain or fear and desperation. At the beginning of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis had been elated that Abraham Lincoln and the Union suddenly had two factions to fight not one. However, the establishment of an absolute monarchy in leiu of a republic dismayed many within the Confederacy. It also became very clear that the Bendevi was ambivalent towards slavery but not a racist; he allowed native loyalists to enslave captured soldiers. One of the founding Haalayt, Abba Midnight, was black and sympathetic to escaped slaves and free people of color. The Bendevi and Abraham Lincoln wrote a long series of letters back and forth in which the Bendevi expressed sympathy for Lincoln as a person and politician. However, he warned Lincoln that he would use the New Dawn militia and tribal war bands to war against the Union until Lincoln agreed to Cascadia's succession. Lincoln refused. Not everyone within Cascadia's borders embraced the new regime. Some of the settlers refused to leave but rejected the establishment of a monarchy and the emerging the class of nobility with supernatural powers and abilities. Som saw the Bendevi and the Aurelian Church as defilement of Christianity and took up arms against it. Some perceived the Bendevi not as a messianic figure and called his Haalyt "fallen angels" and "servants of Satan." There were also tribal leaders in the First Nations who tried to manipulate the events of the war to fufill old vendettas and acquire more territory than originally promised to them by The Bendevi. On May 1st 1861, construction was begun on Caerleon, the seat of power for the new monarchy in Duwamps which was renamed as Seattle in 1866 after the death of the Bendevi's beloved friend and ally, Chief Sealth. Up north in Vancouver, the Conference of a Hundred Voices. It concluded on May 15th with the ratification of the Codex of Cascadia, a constitutional doccument that divided the territory into eight duchies for settlement and fifty-six tribal lands that would be semi-autonomous with native governments. The founding Peerage for the duchies were William Anacortes for Redwood, Gen. David Kane for Lorn, Abba Midnight for Sawtooth, Wavaka Bearpaw for Targhee, David Maynard for Sangreal, Mary Anne O'Malley for Tuatha, Thomas Prescott for Pend Oreille, and Joseph Mayfield for Valemount. Throughout the 1860s, Cascadia stabalized its internal governance and fought the Union and enemy native tribes along the borders. The North American War was still going on when Lincoln was assassinated on April 15th in 1865. It continued through Andrew Johnson's unpopular interim presidency into the election cycle of 1868. In 1867, following the Cascadian purchase of Alaska from Russia and the aquisition of British Columbia and the Yukon from Queen Victoria, Cascadia was extended to a total of 29 duchies and 77 tribalands. Horatio Seymour, a gentle humanitarian and charismatic statesmen defeated Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Seymour by a very narrow margin to become the 18th- and last- president of the United States. He was innaugerated on March 4th. Jefferson Davis and the Bendevi attended a peace summit in Savannah on March 15 1869. Thirteen days later the Treaty of Three Nations was ratified, dividing the United States and its territories into the Northern Union, the Confederacy and Cascadia. Sierra-Nevada emerged later following its own succession from Mexico in the 1880s. On April 1st, 1869, The Bendevi assembled the Courts of Cascadia at Caerleon and before a crowd of over 50,000 Native and Settled people, he placed the Crown of Cascadia upon the head of 17 year old Prince Lucas Constantine. All the First Nations Elders and Dukes/Duchesses formally swore oaths to House Constantine and the engagement of Lucas & Joanna Mayfield was formally announced. Following Lucas' 21st birthday and wedding to Joanna in the winter of 1873, The Bendevi charged the Halaayt to serve King Lucas and his successors as faithfully as they served him. Then he retreated to his own palace on top of Mt. Tahoma, keeping himself beyond the reach of ordinary men for decades.